It wasn’t merely a medieval weapon, Kristen realized. She’d played quite a few fantasy games with her brother—enough to recognize a morning star when she saw one. Basically a spiked metal ball at the end of a wooden club, it made a cruel weapon.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it’s my job to stop you,” she said and pushed herself up. The assassin swung the morning star against the back of her head with enough force to once more tumble her into a hard landing. She didn’t think the weapon could actually puncture her steel skin, but it definitely could rattle her brain around inside. If her adversary struck her temple or throat, it might cause real problems.
With that in mind, she pivoted her hips and spun her legs in a sweeping kick designed to sweep Constance off of her feet.
Unfortunately, the woman was too fast and leapt aside, but that gave Kristen the space she needed to stand.
The assassin obviously recognized that she’d lose any attempt at a melee and hurled the morning star at her, but she knocked it aside.
Kristen surged toward Constance, who danced away and shoved a suit of armor between them.
It crunched under the Steel Dragon’s weight when she stepped on it. The woman yanked a painting off the wall and threw that, but Kristen shredded it like it was a paper banner for a high school football team to run through instead of a priceless oil painting belonging to a wealthy rich dragon.
Constance darted across the room and behind a low table that Kristen simply kicked at her. The woman managed to dodge and it careened past her with inches to spare and shattered when it impacted the wall behind her.
A lamp, a vase, and a chair became puny missiles that the Steel Dragon simply demolished with ease. Something in Constance’s eye seemed to indicate that the woman didn’t know what to make of her foe, who did not care at all about any of these priceless artifacts. Apparently, she had hoped she would.
She threw a small sculpture and made her escape by diving through a window and into the snow. Kristen muttered a string of curses and simply pounded through the wall to resume the pursuit outside.
Constance sprinted through the snow, her tracks already being blown away by whatever magical wind her allies could summon. She was incredibly fast and for a moment, the dragon wasn’t sure if she’d be able to catch her. Before the thought could be put to the test, however, a shot rang out.
The assassin stopped running toward the gate and turned.
Another shot puffed the snow directly in front of her.
“Try to run and see what happens!” Butters whooped from one of the upper windows of the mansion.
She pressed her luck and tried to reach the fence once more, but another perfectly placed shot stopped her dead in her tracks.
“If I give the order, you’re dead,” Kristen said. “I don’t want that. You don’t want that. Put the gun down and let’s talk.”
In response, a flurry of snow kicked up and obscured her quarry briefly. Butters, being nobody’s fool, fired at the cloud and this time, more gunshots joined the barrage. Kristen’s team had taken care of Hernandez, then, and had joined the fight.
No one seemed to be able to shoot Constance, however. She moved constantly, ducking and dodging the bullets with an agility that was inhuman. Kristen realized that her team wasn’t aiming to kill but to control. Most of the shots went long and peppered the snow beyond the fugitive, effectively herding her away from the gate.
“You won’t make it out of here,” Kristen shouted.
The assassin seemed to see the truth of this. She fired once at her and darted toward a topiary bush in the shape of some kind of long-necked dinosaur.
“Don’t let her reach the gate,” the dragon shouted. “But give me a shot at this. I want to take her in alive.”
“Roger!” Butters yelled in response.
Constance seemed to think her chances were better against the Steel Dragon because she stopped her attempt to reach freedom. Instead, she darted from one topiary bush to another, dodging gunfire and trying to put some distance between her and Kristen.
The situation didn’t provide much to work with. She was forced to take cover while her adversary simply had to race forward. The dragon gained and the chase was almost over. Kristen could taste it.
There was only one place Constance could hide—an outbuilding of some kind that Jasper had said she needn’t concern herself with because it was winter.
The assassin made the desperate dash toward this building, slid inside despite a barrage of gunfire, and slammed the door shut behind her. She even went so far as to lock it.
Kristen grinned at the unnecessary gesture. She was the Steel Dragon and locks were no more effective in stopping her than doors were. When she was sure her entire body was steel, she surged forward and bulldozed through the door.
She immediately realized the seriousness of her mistake. On the other side of the door was an inky body of water, black in the unlit room. The indoor pool had only begun to ice around the edges. She tried to stop but in her steel body, her momentum was too great.
Her trajectory took her headlong into the pool and a gunshot rang out as she splashed into the water. Being steel, she sank and the pool engulfed her in its icy blackness.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The cold of the water was unlike anything Kristen had ever experienced. It was painful but also so much more—debilitating, blinding, and numbing. It told her to surrender, to stop, and to let her heat be leached away by this energy that was truly a lack of energy, this presence that was the antithesis to life.
Her brain—confronted with cold in a way it had never been before—fired off synapses in an attempt to make sense of the intense situation. She remembered her brother falling through a frozen pond when he was little as vividly as if it had happened the day before.
They had been ice-skating, and—no surprise—her brother had been terrible at it. He slipped, crashed into a cone that had been put out as a warning of thin ice, and in an instant, he was through the ice and into the water.
Her father had reacted before she could even process that anything was wrong. He stripped his skates off and slid across the ice and into the water, which made young Kristen think of a seal hunting a penguin.
He came out in seconds with Brian in his arms. The water in the pond wasn’t all that deep, thank goodness, and they drove home with the heater on high. Frank Hall cursed everything and nothing with every breath of air, telling Brian to slap his arms and move his legs and for the love of Christ to not fall asleep.
Kristen had thought that a really dumb thing to tell her brother. How could he fall asleep? He’d splashed into frozen water, after all.
But now, at the bottom of this pool, she understood. There was something about the cold that demanded she give up, stop fighting, and surrender to its grasping clutches. Every time she moved her arms, they did nothing. No swimming strokes pulled her closer to the surface. The cold worked itself into her incredibly quickly—perhaps because of her steel skin or perhaps because she was sweaty from her chase. It stole her fingers and toes, then her hands and feet, then her legs until she could only feel her head and body. Even her mind told her to sleep, to give up, and to succumb.
But her heart refused. It was a boiling pot of water, a wood-burning stove, a bonfire, a bomb, and a rocket’s thruster. Her heart was the furnace strong enough to make a dragon fly and to empower her to face bullets. When threatened with its own end, it made her think of her mother and father, her brother, her friends, and the people who wanted to hurt them.
Kristen turned to flesh from steel, kicked off the bottom of the pool, and stroked hard toward the air. She breached the surface of the pool, gasped a breath, and found the edge of the pool. Her hands slipped on the ice lining the edge but on the second attempt to get out, she used her dragon strength to crush the ice and some of the tile surround to give herself better traction.
She hauled herself out and her clothes clung to her with icy water. There was no
movement inside the pool house but she heard gunshots.
Despite her all but frozen limbs, she forced herself to move outside and waved at the mansion.
“Inside,” Butters called from the roof and fired to create a little plume of snow that puffed up close to the mansion as a trail.
Kristen ran forward and transformed into a dragon in the blink of an eye. Immediately, gunshots erupted from a door to the house, obviously from Constance.
She changed back to her steel human form and landed outside the door. Her dragon form had been blessedly warm. She’d absorbed her clothing—or displaced it or whatever it was dragons did with their clothes when they changed—but now, it was back and still as cold and clinging as before.
Hardly believing what she was doing, she stripped her pants, her soaking wet boots, and her shirt off until she wore nothing but her still icy underwear. She put her bulletproof vest on again and started down the stairway, her human flesh pimply with goosebumps but much warmer than she had been with the wet clothes.
It seemed that the furnace of her dragon abilities was enough to warm her now that she’d discarded the freezing wet clothes and her naked arms and legs steamed as she descended the steps that Constance had fled down.
Kristen fumbled for a light switch and found one, but it was totally destroyed. No doubt the assassin’s work. She scowled and focused to pierce the darkness of the basement with her dragon night vision.
Innumerable crates were stacked down there alongside boxes and shelves of what, in a human’s house, would no doubt be old junk. On a dragon estate, they might very well be powerful artifacts spanning centuries.
Movement in the back caught her attention. She descended the rest of the stairs slowly until she reached the bottom.
As she stepped forward into the space, a shot rang out and pain bloomed in her shoulder. Despite her steel skin, she’d been hit. Her left arm went limp so either a nerve had been damaged or the dragon bullet itself was enough to paralyze the appendage. Either way, her arm was useless. Worse, she realized her guns were at the bottom of the freezing pool.
Constance stepped from the shadows, two hands holding a steady gun that was aimed at Kristen’s chest.
She grimaced and turned her skin from steel to flesh once more and held her one working arm up in a gesture of peace.
In response to this gesture of goodwill, the woman raised her weapon from pointing at her bulletproof vest to her face.
Kristen sighed. This was not going well. “Why don’t you do it then?” she said. “You have the damn shot, why not take it?”
The fury that flashed across Constance’s face told Kristen that she was asking herself the same question. That meant she didn’t want her to die.
“Who are you?” she asked and took a step forward.
Her adversary took two steps back and kept the gun trained on her face for a moment. Then, her jaw began to tremble and a single tear trickled down her cheek, an unbidden sign of her humanity. “I’m…your mother, I think.”
“I already have a mom, thanks, and she’s not a murderer with a gun pointed at my face right now.”
“You don’t understand—you can’t understand!”
“Then tell me.” She grew more frustrated by the minute.
“I…I remember that red hair but I could be wrong. Many of us think I’m wrong but I…I remember.”
“Everyone remembers my hair, Constance. If a male anchor covers any of my busts, it’s essentially guaranteed that they mention I have sexy red hair and tits.”
“No, no. I remember that first little tuft. It was almost like a cartoon character. All bald except for this tuft of red hair at the top. It’s…it has to be you.”
A chill tremored through her very core. Her mom had said the same thing about her a hundred times—hell, she’d seen the baby pictures. She’d very definitely had a little tuft of hair on her head when she was a baby. “How do you know that about me?” she demanded.
“We all had our role to play, but I never imagined our experiments could be as successful as…as you have been.”
Did you actually call me an experiment? She wanted to say it out loud but found that her mouth was dry and her mind spinning. An experiment? What did that mean? What did that imply? She knew her aunt had worked as some kind of a biologist at a dragon’s lab and that she’d left Kristen with her brother Frank. She had always more or less assumed that she was her Aunt Christina’s baby, even though Frank had never been sure. Could she be…could she be something else? Could she be something so far removed from the spectrum of human and even dragon existence? She knew she was a dragon, which by its nature made her not human, but an experiment?
“You’ve done more to break the divide between human and dragon kind than anyone in history.” Constance was really babbling now. “Your very existence is controversial. Yet you haven’t hidden from the limelight but embraced it. You’re everything we hoped for and more. You can bring it all down.”
She had so many questions—a hundred questions, maybe even a thousand—but at that moment, so much had become clear. Her first instinct was to ask Constance what she had meant by an experiment or how she could think of herself as a mother to her and yet abandon her. But the woman had revealed her true self, and Kristen no longer had time for selfish questions.
“I don’t want to break anything. Humans and dragons need a bridge built between their cultures, not a larger divide.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Dragons can never come around to seeing things our way. That’s like asking humans not to eat meat.”
“Have you ever heard of a vegetarian?” She took another step forward.
“Dragons are different than people. They can’t be reasoned with. That’s why we had to kill Windfire. Even if he stayed loyal to me and our current leaders, he would have betrayed us eventually. If not this decade, then the next, and if not this century, he’d betray our children.”
“So you killed him? You killed the man who gave you what you needed to conduct dragon experiments—to make these damn bullets?” It was a stab in the dark, a bluff and a well-informed guess, and it totally paid off.
“Do you think I felt good about killing a man with bullets made from his own body?” Constance choked out. “Do you think it’s easy talking to you right now, knowing that I killed your father?”
That was enough for her. She rushed forward as she flashed her aura to try to make her adversary feel hesitation and doubt in her beliefs. It worked—or if it didn’t, she already felt that way. The woman lowered her gun, possibly with the intention of firing at her other arm, but Kristen had anticipated as much and used her dragon speed to get out of the way of the shot.
“My father’s name is Frank,” she said and threw her injured shoulder into the assassin to launch her back and into a crate. It splintered and spilled gold coins across the floor.
The pain in her shoulder was insane. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat, gave her tunnel vision, and screamed at her to pass out rather than feel anything more, but it was worth it to see the look on her adversary’s face.
The woman was furious that she still referred to Frank as her father, despite the fact that both of them knew full well that was not the case at all.
Constance—sentimentality seemingly forgotten—raised her weapon again but Kristen had finally run out of patience. She surged forward and changed to steel as her knee drove into the hand holding the gun. The assassin chose to drop the weapon rather than break her fingers, and it clattered away and was swallowed by the shadows of the basement.
Kristen raised her steel fist and was about to bring it down onto Constance’s solar plexus when her feet were swept out from under her. She sprawled into the pile of gold coins as her opponent scrambled away.
She followed closely and kept herself between her quarry and the exit. Her left arm still hung loosely and barely responded to her commands, acknowledging them with screams of pain whenever she tried to use it.
T
he killer understood the situation well. Despite her speed, she couldn’t make it past the Steel Dragon. Rather than make the futile attempt, she raised her hands. Instead of fists, she held them like knife blades. Kristen was very much convinced that this killer of dragons would have some kind of plan to attack her, even in her steel form.
Constance didn’t disappoint. She launched herself into an assault, her arms a whirlwind of blows. The dragon defended herself as best as she could with her right arm, but many of the strikes found their target. The assassin hit hard—no doubt about that—but she had faced dragons while wearing her steel skin and a human simply didn’t compare to the power she had struggled against.
She swung a right and missed, so she kicked instead. That single blow was enough to catapult her attacker across the room. She might have had an injured arm, but she still possessed a font of dragon strength, and her legs—wrapped in steel—carried far more power than the woman could hope to deliver or even stand against.
Kristen decided that three blows should end the fight. Constance would be defeated, and she could finally get some damn answers.
The assassin seemed to disagree, however. She was back on her feet and glared at Kristen through the dark of the basement before she raced toward her and enveloped her in a whirlwind of broken wood and shards from the damaged crates.
She pounded into the dragon’s defensive stance and hammered blows on her steel arms. The attack was relentless and unstoppable, as fast as any dragon she had ever sparred with and possibly faster. Her blows didn’t hurt but they didn’t leave an opening to attack either.
Kristen ventured a kick, only to have her leg kicked down again. She tried with the other leg and Constance again swept her legs out from under her.
She landed with another solid thump and immediately pushed herself up into another whirlwind of blows and scattered treasure.
“How many of you are there?” Kristen demanded as she dodged and squinted through the flying debris. Technically, they shouldn’t be able to hurt me, she thought. She’d looked in the mirror enough times to know that even her eyeballs turned to steel—or the whites did, anyway—but it was hard to fight against a lifetime of human instincts.
The Steel Dragon (Steel Dragons Series Book 2) Page 18
